Apple has today announced its Apple silicon chips will soon be produced and packaged in Arizona, thanks to a $2 billion deal with its partner Amkor in the region.
Apple says "it will be the first and largest customer of the new Amkor manufacturing and packaging facility being developed in Peoria, Arizona," and that Amkor "will package Apple silicon produced at the nearby TSMC fab."
Apple COO Jeff Williams said the company was " thrilled that Apple silicon will soon be produced and packaged in Arizona." Apple has already worked with Amkor for more than 10 years packaging the chips that go into products like Apple's iPhone and iPad. The two have now partnered "to build the largest outsourced advanced packaging facility in America" thanks to a $2 billion investment from Amkor. Once completed the project will support 2,000 local jobs.
Apple invests at home
As Apple notes in its press release, this is all part of Apple's commitment to invest $430 billion in the U.S. economy over five years made in 2021. The company says it is "on pace to meet its target."
The packaging news this week is a big deal because, as has previously been reported, Apple's prior investment in the region was hamstrung by the fact that chips made in Arizona still had to be sent to Taiwan for packaging. At the time The Information said TSMC had no plans to build a facility in Arizona or anywhere else in the U.S., and one commenter described the TSMC Arizona fab as "effectively a paperweight." The Amkor deal announced today should be a big boon to both Apple and the Biden administration, which has thrown its weight behind the $40 billion project.
Apple silicon includes the A17 Pro chip from its new best iPhone, the iPhone 15 Pro, as well as the new M3 lineup of chips featured in the M3 iMac and its 16-inch M3 Max MacBook Pro. Both are built on a new 3nm process that packs more power and performance into the same amount of space, while also delivering big efficiency savings. The chips are so potent they include hardware-accelerated ray-tracing, as such you'll soon be able to play the console version of Assassin's Creed Mirage on iPhone.
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